She laughs softly. “Good luck!” After a pause, she adds, “And thanks.”
“For what?”
“For… not being weirdly intense about my secret.”
“Likewise.” I head toward the door, open it, and look at her over my shoulder. “You’ll be a real badass someday, Millie.”
“I already am,” she fires back as I shut the door.
12
ALEX
Basil pushes his glasses higher on his nose. “The current decade is a much bigger mess than the previous one.”
“Understatement,” I say.
My accountant is back at Fort Vauclairt this morning, and we’ve resumed our audit of Geoffroy’s books. We’re working from the old study overlooking the west terrace. A faint smell of wax and old paper clings to the air. The dusty ledgers sprawled before us look too old for their actual age, as if being botched and abandoned wears them down prematurely.
I flip another page and frown. “Were these done by a human or a ferret?”
“The estate manager himself, I am told,” Basil replies.
My frown deepens. “Does he have a drinking problem?”
“Not that I know of.”
Eric Latour has a sleazy, shifty quality about him that made my antennas twitch the moment we were introduced. I knew I didn’t like him, despite all his brownnosing, and I’m pleased my instincts were spot-on.
The numbers are inconsistent. Line items half labeled. Not even a whisper of reconciliation between expenses and income.If a first-year student in the economics class I used to teach handed in something like this, I’d give them a big fat F.
Basil gestures toward a margin. “That one says ‘miscellaneous stable expenses’ but the amount is?—”
“—twenty-five thousand in one quarter,” I finish. “Did the horses develop a cocaine habit?”
Basil snorts. “We’re not in that part of Europe.”
“I’m not laughing.”
I flip through the ledger in my hands. Heating, repairs, taxes, Millie’s 500K-a-year treatment, other line items you’d expect. An overpriced feasibility study and an equally inflated business plan for a luxury resort with a casino and spa on the estate. Was that how Geoffroy hoped to fix his finances?
No surprise there.
What puzzles me is that I don’t see the extravagant spending I expected for Eva. A designer purse here, a gala gown there, bespoke shoes every now and then, and an expensive diamond necklace. But that’s it. I don’t see absurd last-minute trips to the Maldives or shopping splurges at Cartier rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré. For a gold digger who married a man old enough to be her father, Eva wasn’t doing a very good job.
Geoffroy’s flights are there, but Eva doesn’t appear to be on any of them. Sometimes Julian goes. Most of the time, it’s just Geoffroy, alone, jetting off on yet another pointless business trip.
The fuel line items are absurd. The hotels and meals expenses—worthy of royalty.
Sure, he was a duke, and high standards were almost mandatory. But Rohinn’s economy wasn’t doing nearly as well as the rest of the country overall. Geoffroy lived beyond his means.
Basil clears his throat. “There’s something you should see.”
I lean back as he sets a ledger in front of me. Hand-bound with tidy, color-coded labels and a lilac ribbon bookmark, it looks unlike the other ledgers. I recognize the writing inside at once.
“Eva.”
“I found it in Geoffroy’s office,” Basil says. “Looks like the duchess kept her own books.”
